The Lawyers Weekly - June 18, 2010

A few weeks ago, the Roman
Catholic Primate of Canada, Car-
dinal Marc Ouellet, sent the chat-
tering classes into a frenzy when he
said abortion was a “moral crime,”
even if the woman concerned had
been raped. Last time, we noted
that the cardinal’s remark was
ambiguous, logically, legally, and
probably deliberately. We began
looking at how a story from the
World War II era by the French
writer Marcel Aymé shows that the
term “moral crime” confounds the
sacred or philosophical with the
legal. If it means anything, particu-
larly by Ouellet’s lights, it can only
be “sin,” which in civil society has
grown distinct from “crime.”
The cardinal avoided men-

OFF THE RECORD

JEFFREY
MILLER

tioning sin, probably because it has little persuasive value in modern, developed cultures. It has come to sound quaint if not old-fashioned. By using “moral crime” he seemed to skirt the greater provocation of calling a raped woman a criminal let alone a sinner, as some Islamist extremists have done, while still attempting to “criminalize” her dilemma.

As we said last week, in Aymé’s
“Grace” a piously Christian man
named Duperrier tries to get rid
of a halo his wife finds embar-
rassing. His earnest method for
this is to commit all the seven
deadly sins. But because he is
bad for saintly reasons, and
because the higher law’s grace is
bestowed so generously and
“non-judgmentally,” the halo
stays put. Duperrier is “chosen.”
But imagine now that he com-
mits secular crimes instead of sins.
It immediately becomes clear that
while a man might remain pious
when he sins for the right reasons,
it is generally no legal excuse that
to feed his family he robs banks
politely, or that he gently kills
Stalin while he sleeps in his bed to
stop the dictator from trying and
executing him for supposed polit-
ical dissent. Crime is what a given
society defines it to be, such that
Nazism or Jim Crow laws or apart-
heid can be “legal” in a given time
and place. For the same reason,
Nelson Mandela was in prison for
27 years, only to emerge a hero,
and president, when the law
changed. Sin, on the other hand,
always retains its character as sin.
Even if sometimes it is forgivable,
liability is absolute.

Could not publicly respond to charges

Cimon
Continued From Page 1
tion should be criminalized. The
same holds true for the donations
I made to the Liberals. I am a fed-
eralist, and that was the only place
I could donate.”
Though the 67-year old trial
lawyer asserts he is apolitical,
never attended a political meeting
nor solicited or received any bene-
fit from any government, and does
not even know any member of the
Liberal party, he felt he had no
choice to step down in order to
avoid doubt being cast on the
impartiality of the Bastarache
commission and to ensure the
serenity of its procedures.

The former chair of the ethics committee at the Barreau du Québec said that though the commission was “practically ready to begin” its work after spending weeks of preparation, Cimon said it became impossible to get any work done due to the “media and political circus.” Warding off the charges sapped morale within the commission’s team of 15 lawyers and became so time-consuming that “more and more time” was being spent on discussing on how to deal with the charges than the work at hand.

Frustrating matters even more was the fact that Cimon was constrained by the duty to act in a reserved manner. Cimon could not and did not publicly respond to the charges while in the employ of the commission. Instead, he had to rely on press releases issued by the commission to fight back, but “obviously it was not enough,” said Cimon.

“It’s sad,” said Cimon, a senior
partner with Ogilvy Renault,
who chaired from 2004 to 2007
the committee on the remunera-
tion of the judges of the Court of
Québec and the municipal courts
established under the Courts of
Justice Act. “While no one ever
brought up the issue of compe-
tence, visceral and unreasonable
doubts were raised. I was guilty
by association. The mere fact
that I donated to the Liberal
Party raised fears that I was sus-
ceptible of losing my judgment,
of being impartial, of being cor-
rupted. By merely exercising
one’s rights, my integrity was
attacked. It makes no sense.”
Indeed, both Bastarache and
Cimon were completely taken
aback by the turn of events. As is
the case with any new mandate,
Cimon informed Bastarache over
any possible sticky issues, and
discussions were held over
Cimon’s donations to the Liberals.
“Neither he nor I could have
imagined the events that tran-
spired,” added Cimon.

Quotes by Pierre Cimon and
Pierre Trudel translated from
French by the author.

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